And GPU's are mandatory. CPU's are good for doing large calculations, but bitcoin mining is mostly short simple ones. GPU's are highly parallelized (spellcheck) so they can do multiple computations at once.

Typical bitcoin miner. You ready to make that kind of investment?

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Truly superior pilots are those who use their superior judgment to avoid those situations where they might have to use their superior skills.

Bitcoin utilizes public/private key digital signatures (ECDSA). A coin has its owner's public key on it. When a coin is transferred from user A to user B, A adds Bís public key to the coin and signs it with his own private key. Now B owns the coin and can transfer it further. To prevent A from transferring the already used coin to another user C, a public list of all the previous transactions is collectively maintained by the network of Bitcoin nodes, and before each transaction the coinís unusedness will be checked

i listened to a podcast which explained quite well the mechanics of Bitcoin, even though i agree only with some of their opinions about using the service. http://sixgun.org/linuxoutlaws/215

think of it as sort of like p2p banking/transactions.

from what i understand, Bitcoin mining is related to doing validations of the transactions that are happening, which is done by doing a computationally difficult problem. if you or the network you belong to (there have been groups organized for specifically mining, then dividing out the coins among the members) solve the problem, then you get bitcoins "out of thin air". The number of bitcoins in the network will be at most only 21 million. The rate at which these coins are created (aka, the rate at which the problems are solved) are determined algorithmically and related to the total number of computing power of the whole network.

he might be referring to joining the bitcoin network to use the service, not mining? currently in average it takes a month to solve a block and get bitcoins.

also there are several exchanges for trading bitcoins for cash. AFAIK there is no standard rate for exchanging a particular currency among these services, though i imagine those rates will be pretty close to one another.

Just enter your MHash/sec rate, platform power consumption and power cost per kWh. I zeroed the hardware cost on the assumption that you already have a PC and it's paid for). Other values are pretty much correct as pre-filled.

7970 is about 650MHash/sec and about 350W platform power when mining with an optimzed client.